Sam McBride: Even after RHI, civil servants’ aversion to criticism hints at an enduring problem

Has the humiliating exposure of the RHI scandal really changed how civil servants operate away from scrutiny within Stormont departments?

Sometimes the smallest things can reveal a larger truth.

Last week, the News Letter reported how a Stormont-funded report into how energy policy is handled had conveyed concern that corporate interests could be unduly influencing policy.

The academic authors said they had been told the Department for the Economy (DfE) was not “seen as a competent authority on energy matters” and that “concerns were also raised that because of the perceived lack of leadership, it may be easy for companies to slow or influence the introduction of policies which could affect them with ‘building’ companies and ‘agri-food’ mentioned specifically”.

It went on: “One interviewee suggested that this issue may become particularly acute if the energy transition requires policy ‘that the industry might not like so much’. The relatively small nature of the NI energy policy community was also suggested to mean that ‘vested interests have a more direct line into government and can make things more difficult if they are against something’.”

For a government-funded document, that constitutes intriguing and concerning material – and particularly so in this case because of what has recently been unearthed.

The RHI Inquiry revealed how Northern Ireland’s biggest private sector employer, agri-food giant Moy Park, had extraordinary access to government and was receiving inside information on a preferential basis not only from Arlene Foster’s then special adviser, Andrew Crawford, but also from civil servants.

The academic report said that one interviewee had told them: “The people who are ministers and in government don’t have the expertise. They listen to experts and the experts they are listening to are people who are currently employed in industry”.

But as candid as those comments are, we now know they are only the leaves of the tree; buried away from view are roots which the public were never intended to see.

Academics at the University of Exeter had been paid more than £20,000 by DfE to study how to improve the governance of energy in Northern Ireland. The outcome was their ‘Energy governance for the Northern Ireland energy transition’ report. With 55 pages of text, head-scratchingly complex diagrams, recommendations and footnotes, it is the sort of document which any remotely normal person would view prefer to avoid unless they had a particular reason to be interested in the finer points of energy policy.

But this report drew significant attention from civil servants in DfE. That might be seen as reassuring because the department is responsible for energy policy and the report examines issues which will impact whether the lights stay on in Northern Ireland, how we heat our homes, how we travel, how much we pay for those things, and how much the environment is damaged in the process.

But some of what exercised the officials was less about energy and more about awkward topics for their department. Detective work by The Irish News’s political correspondent, John Manley, this week revealed that a number of remarks which cast the department in a negative light were removed from the report following discussions between civil servants and the report’s authors.

A line that implied weak leadership and said “party political issues affected governance” did not appear in the final version – nor did the wholly accurate reference to the RHI Inquiry being established “over concerns around potential fraud and abuse of positions of authority”.

Emails obtained by The Irish News show that DfE requested the names of those the authors interviewed for their research – a group which included civil servants – only to be told that such a disclosure would breach research ethics.

There is a reason why all of this is particularly concerning. This is the department responsible for the cash for ash scandal and the RHI Inquiry heard evidence that DfE (then known as DETI) was unhappy with what had been proposed by consultants paid £100,000 to advise it on the design of the green heating scheme.

The inquiry heard how consultants CEPA believed an RHI-type scheme was £200 million more expensive and less effective than another option – yet their report did not make that clear recommendation. Internal CEPA emails from six years later, by which stage the subsidy had imploded, showed a senior employee saying that it was “clear that DETI wanted an RHI”.

Another senior figure from the company admitted in evidence that “there probably was some negotiation” with DETI, suggesting a willingness to fudge the professional finding of a supposedly independent report purely because those footing the bill wanted that outcome.

The civil servants involved at the time indignantly denied they had attempted to tamper with the report, yet proffered no logical reason as to why CEPA would suppress its professional view – in the process breaching its contractual obligation to make a recommendation.

Having pored over inquiry documentation around this detail, what The Irish News revealed this week seemed eerily familiar.

In 2011 the CEPA report seemed a dry document dealing with a complex area about which few people were paying attention, just as many people would view the Exeter report. Yet Northern Ireland is on the cusp of deciding an energy strategy which will have implications for decades to come. This report was meant to inform that process. Given that DfE sought to alter this report, has it done so with other reports on which big decisions are being based?

A decade on from when RHI was being born, the team of civil servants has changed. The minister has changed. We are told that Stormont has changed. “Lessons have been learned”, mandarins and ministers tell the public.

From the outside, the truth is difficult to know but several civil servants have privately expressed concern that parts of Stormont are slipping to their old ways.

Four months ago DfE’s most senior civil servant, Mike Brennan, told staff that they need to have difficult conversations with each other and with ministers about what it is realistic for them to deliver.

His comments implied that officials were overworked – and it is true that over the last year many dedicated civil servants have toiled long hours in trying circumstances to coordinate the response to the pandemic.

But it is difficult to accept that the civil service is stretched to the limit when there are civil servants who have time to try to remove factual and justified criticisms from an independent report and civil servants who work to suppress awkward information being released to the public even when the terms of the Freedom of Information Act mean that should happen.

I asked DfE why it sought to amend a report which it publicly claimed to be wholly “independent research”, why it wanted to know the identities of those to whom the academics had spoken, and whether it has a policy of attempting to change other reports which it then presents as “independent” of the department.

In response, it said that the research was the work of the authors “and the words contained within it are the responsibility and the views of the authors”.

DfE added: “The department’s role in any external research is to ensure it is factually accurate and supported by evidence.”

When asked why the report did not make clear that changes had been made, Dr Richard Lowes, one of the authors, said that their discussions with Stormont were “very similar to any other interaction we would expect to have with an institution that asks us to do a report” and that said changes requested by a client were not unusual but ”none of the changes...have changed the report materially”.

The report itself said “we engaged closely with the NI Executive throughout the study” but that the document was “the responsibility and views of the authors only”.

It should not take a journalist to uncover that this leaves out the scale of departmental influence.

After all, it was paid for with our money.

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